A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.
Kind of not surprising with the ruling a year or so ago, where Air Canada had to follow through on what its AI chatbot had told a customer.
Well, and I guess, due to basic logic. Any other webpage has to take responsibility for the content they publish, whether it is written by a human or by an LLM. There’s no good reason why Google should be treated differently here.
Still an interesting development, though. There’s no guaranteed way to make an LLM not say something. I guess, what they could do, is to run a regular script over the output before it’s displayed and then, for example, just not display anything, if those publishers’ names show up in the output.